A memorial to my Mother (in words not metal):
Growing up, I thought I would be sad when my mom passed, but I didn’t think I would cry. In fact, I was afraid I wouldn’t cry, not because I didn't love her (I most certainly did), but because that’s not how I typically manifest my sadness. I guess, thankfully, I was wrong. I cried a lot.
As her time to pass grew nearer and nearer, I started to take pictures, record video, capture audio, and, for the first time in a long while, decided to write down moments. My mother used to urge me to keep a journal while I was growing up and while I am a huge proponent for people recording and documenting their lives, I was never one to write in a diary or capture moments in words. I am not a writer nor am I particularly well versed in penning moments to paper, that is not my art form, but seeing the immensity of this occasion in my life, I feel that words are really the only things that can fully capture what I have witnessed.
These are the snapshots of time I had recorded as my mom lay in bed, in a little room, in a house, out under the California Sun. The entire time, the sky was bright and blue, the birds sang during the day and the crickets chirped through each night. If I were writing this novel, it would have been raining, wet, soggy, and miserable. But no, people were jogging together, kids were playing tag, the world kept on turning outside my parent’s home. We were inside, and our world had stopped.
Moment 1:
The room was nearly silent other than the whirring overhead fan as it struggled to beat away the Davis heat. Mom’s chest would slowly rise, hold, and then slowly fall as the slightest groan would pass through her lips. Her eyes were fixed in the distance as she listened to the world around her but it was quiet, just silence and the gentle hum of the overhead fan whirring away.
Every once in a while, mom would raise her hand and gently wave it side to side, as if conducting a symphony that only she could hear. Occasionally, she would reach her hand out as if she was going to grasp one of our hands but then she would pull it back and she would return to conducting her invisible orchestra.
I would have given anything to hear what she was hearing. Her symphonic masterpiece, albeit, a requiem.
Moment 2:
Once, she asked the caregiver to see Dad so we all piled into the room. She started talking to us in short bursts. Lots of words, muffled sounds, it felt like sentences were flowing out of her, only she couldn’t open her mouth wide enough to let them out. All we heard were muffled, garbled, phrases. Crescendos and decrescendos. Then silence. She was always the person who had such hard convictions, who worked so hard to be learned and to be meaningful when she spoke. She was a bastion of knowledge and always so carefully worded. But now, collectively we could not understand a word. We listened each time she would speak, and although we could not decipher her newly adopted tongue, we clung onto every word. I would have been okay with her talking at us for hours but after a few minutes of our one-sided conversation, she drifted off again. Dad mustered up a brave yet still gentle smile, he looked at each of us and gave us all a gentle nod confirming that mom was back to sleep, and we left mom to rest.
We all gathered at the kitchen table and sat, reorienting ourselves. Then, in his grand wisdom coupled with superhuman stoicism, my dad sat upright, clapped his hands together and said, “Alright, it’s time to either be sad and angry, or to do chores. So, I think I’ll do chores”. So we all did too.
The Moment:
Alice and I were back at home. It had been a long day. I hadn’t slept the night before because I had been up for hours at the computer writing these memories all night. We had just got back from the vet and we were going to head back to my parent’s house but I needed to take a short nap to recoup some of the sleepless hours I had stolen from myself the night before. I had laid back in my chair and dozed off as the midday sun gently warmed the apartment. And then…
My phone woke me up, chiming with its usual ringtone. I should have known what was coming but my grogginess tricked me into thinking it was just a normal call from my brother. I picked up the phone.
“Hey, what’s up?” I asked. From the other line, I heard in a somber tone (a tone my brother usually saves for the most dire of circumstances), “Mom has passed”. I had no idea what to say, we had been expecting this for weeks now but everything still was not registering. “Thank you for calling me, thank you for letting me know.” I hung up. Alice and I quickly packed up our things and headed out the door to hopefully make it to my mother’s bedside before the funeral home came to pick up her body. Just before getting into the car, I whipped out my phone and took a picture of the sky. I wanted to capture the exact sky, the day, the weather, the wispy cloud that hung in the blue sky above me. I wanted to capture the moment Alice and I went on our last car ride to see my mother before she was taken away.
Of course we hit traffic. We got stuck behind every slow car on the road. We got trapped behind a bullyish RV on a backroad that was supposed to save us 15 minutes on our trip. I never wanted to flip off other drivers more than that entire ride, but I didn’t, they weren’t rushing to their mom’s bedside. They didn’t know, but I was seething that everyone in the world didn’t realize we were in a rush, that unlike them, we actually had somewhere to be. By my mom, before she was taken away.
Somehow, we got to my dad’s house in time. I rushed in and briskly greeted my dad and brother. Then, I went to say my goodbye to my mom.
I had spent the last two weeks with my mom, seeing her health deteriorate and watching as she ate less and less of the chicken soups that I made her. I had witnessed her body slowly thin out as she lost all body fat, but even after seeing all that happen with my own eyes, the body I saw before me seemed so much thinner. It had only been one and a half days since I had last seen her but she was so much more delicate and frail.
It is always heartbreaking to have to say, “at least she is in a better place” because it is true, I cannot deny that. It is good she no longer had to suffer through being unable to eat, through the infusions, the chemo, the nausea, and her body’s internal warfare. After all the pain and the anguish she must have gone through, yes, “at least she is in a better place”. But, I still am selfish and wish she wasn’t in a better place but rather that she was here with us, now. I never learned how to make turkey taste like Thanksgiving, I never learned how to make stew taste like a hug. When I make her coleslaw recipe, it still doesn’t taste right because every time I asked her how much sugar to put in, she would say “until it tastes right”. What do I do now? I feel like a child, wishing for the fantastical, and even if it goes against every fiber of my being, I have to continually convince myself, “at least she is in a better place”.
The Day After:
We stayed with my dad and brother for a day in the house. I cooked some food for dad so he had a home cooked meal for the week. My brother and Alice helped clean and organize. When I had a moment to myself, I timidly walked over to the room where mom had spent the last few weeks laying in a hospital bed. There was still medical equipment and oxygen tanks and tubes and knobs and pumps that peppered the room.
The overhead ceiling fan that was once constantly spinning keeping mom’s room cool and the air flowing, now was silent and motionless. The bed that she had lain in was now empty as the funeral home had already come by. The bed was empty, she was gone, but the bed was still neatly made, corners tucked, it was almost military. My Navy mom would have been proud.
I decided to sit with the empty bed so I pulled up a seat, the one my dad had sat in for so many hours, and just before sitting down, I changed my mind and sat right down on the carpet (my Dad had earned that chair, not me). My eyes now level with the tightly wrapped bedspread. I sat in silence.
Have you ever listened to silence so hard that it almost sounds like buzzing? The fan now made no whirring motor, no whooshing air, the radio had no BBC newscaster droning in the background, there were not even any children hollering or screaming in the playground just beyond the room’s windows. It was just quiet. The loudest, most deafening quietude that it truly sounded like the very silence was buzzing, resonating throughout the room. It was a perfect silence where someone could sit and weep.
So I did. Finality is good in television shows but not so much in real life.
